Kiran Desai is an Indian author who is a citizen of India and a permanent resident of the United States. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.

The daughter of novelist Anita Desai (author of In Custody 1984), Kiran Desai grew up in India, England and the United States. After starting college studies in science she switched to writing, and published her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, in 1998. The book earned praise from critics and got a boost from kind words by Salman Rushdie. Desai then spent six years writing The Inheritance of Loss, a novel that examines the intricacies of relationships in post-colonial India, England and the U.S.

In September 2007 she was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme hosted by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3. In May 2007 she was the featured author at the inaugural Asia House Festival of Asian Literature.